I, for one, welcome our new robot spider overlords

[OGIS]

God DAMN it, they are stealing one of my story ideas.

Siemens Created Spider Bots That 3D Print

Walking printers who just so happen to be robot spiders

Shipbuilding is a community effort. For Siemens, that community in the future won’t just be the engineers, designers, and workmen on a project: it will also include an army of small robot spiders, 3D printing and weaving together plastic to build that hull. Think of it like a normal shipbuilding facility, only with hundreds of tiny scurrying parts, all working together.

From Siemens:

To accomplish this, the robots use...

http://www.popsci.com/siemens-create...m_content=link

[Dr. Who]

God DAMN it, they are stealing one of my story ideas.

This is sci-fi becoming reality. I have read about nanobots (on a far smaller scale than these) for years in sci-fi.

[OGIS]

This is sci-fi becoming reality. I have read about nanobots (on a far smaller scale than these) for years in sci-fi.

From the current novel we are working on:

"These smaller [Extrusion bots] were flat hexagon-shaped machines. They were the bots doing the actual construction. They accepted the raw materials offered by the Supply Bots, processed them as necessary, and then extruded the finished products via nozzles located at each of their six corners. Both corners and edges had universal grapples so the Extrusion Bots could link to each other as needed to create large sheets or volumes of any given material. Working alone or in conjunction with their peers, they “printed” the required materials in the locations specified by the Master Plan of the new starship."©2016.